Self-Driving Pizza Trucks Are Real, Because Life Is ‘Black Mirror’ Now

Of all the dark, dystopian tech Black Mirror has devised in four seasons, we never thought pizza would betray us. And yet, our inexorable slide into Charlie Brooker’s digital nightmare continues, as Pizza Hut will soon have self-driving trucks out to murder us all.

First – some context. It was Black Mirror Season 4’s “Crocodile” that prominently made use of an auto-driving pizza truck, though an unfortunate pedestrian getting caught in its path wasn’t the misuse of technology central to the episode. The same “Fence’s Pizza” was also seen to employ delivery folk in “U.S.S. Callister.” All the same, Pizza Hut has joined with Amazon and several others in early partnership with Toyota’s electric, autonomous e-Palette truck, essentially fulfilling the same function:

Driverless vehicles can do much more than bring us pizza, as a video presentation highlighted additional possibilities like mobile hotels, ride-sharing and more. The vehicles will make their first official appearances at the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo (h/t Geekwire), but the Black Mirror Twitter account couldn’t wait that long to comment:

For what it’s worth, Brooker told Entertainment Weekly that he believed the autonomous pizza truck would actually make the pizzas itself:

I like to think that it must make your pizza in the truck … Yeah. You order the pizza using an app, and it comes and finds you like an Uber.

Pizza-delivering robots aren’t the worst way our world has come to resemble Black Mirror, but let’s agree to run for the hills if Jesse Plemons ever takes command of a starship.